Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (4 page)

During this time, it was a little disturbing being an Iranian, as the media whipped the public into a never-before-seen media frenzy. When dealing on a personal level, I was relieved to find my students at GWU being very respectful. This is the way it is in America. While prejudice may exist against a whole group of people, it disappears after people come to know you.

It was also during this time that I made the decision to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.

At GWU, I became a tenured faculty member and the director of the international business department. Continuing to teach, I decided to sell The Computer Emporium because of increasing market competition from IBM, which had opened retail outlets close to our store. My computer pioneering days were over, yet I was about to embark on another groundbreaking endeavor.

While remaining a professor, in 1982 I began another company, Intrados International Management Group, which provided executive education programs for officials from developing countries. While the Harvards and MITs of the world were also conducting executive education programs, they were ignoring the vast need and desire of the developing world for these same services. We started to provide executive education to managers and government officials of developing countries, building on the network I had developed while working at the World Bank and teaching in executive programs. The business grew and became quite successful. One of the programs we developed was running and managing state-owned enterprises. Thus, we found our niche in the Reagan-inspired privatization boom of the 1980s and soon became consultants and contractors for many USAID projects around the world, as privatization became an active policy initiative of many nations. What started out as running two-week courses in Washington, D.C., with officials from places such as Cameroon, Nepal, and the Philippines, soon grew into a global endeavor needing additional staff and global support. Here, I tapped my sister, who was a vice president at JPMorgan, to help run the company, as there was no one else I felt I could trust as much with seeing my vision to fruition than family.

The same year I started Intrados, my first child, Otessa Marie, was born. She, being my parents’ only grandchild, was loved, as any cherished child would be. Initially going by the name of Otessa, she insisted on being called Marie once reaching middle school. We reluctantly obliged her teenage attempts at assimilation.

Meanwhile, in the boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Intrados ended up winning many government contracts, including providing technical assistance services to support the privatization and economic restructuring program for Eastern Europe and the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union. We went on to develop the software, to train the people, and to set up the stock exchanges in Russia, Romania, Kazakhstan, and Moldova for one-fortieth the price of what NASDAQ or the French Bourse would charge. And we did it all on desktop computers, not the typical mainframes.

Unfortunately, government contracts and contractors are of a different breed. Intrados ended up in a multiyear legal battle with the U.S. government, which resulted in exorbitant lawyers’ fees. The battle was a result of the U.S. government not willing to pay us for the work we had done. The designated contract administrator did not have the authority or the budget to ask for the task we were instructed to carry out. When we submitted the invoices, the government retaliated by repeatedly auditing and harassing our operations. I realized that in order to achieve any kind of resolution, I would have to spend even more of my employees’ and my time, with the only guarantee being that the lawyers would be able to buy another luxury vacation home. By 1998, we decided it was time to cut our losses, so we settled with the government and shut the doors. The disappointing part of the experience was that major accounting and consulting firms were asked to step in, to hire a number of our staff, and simply to continue the work we were doing without providing us any compensation. The lesson I learned from the whole debacle is that you need to be an insider when it comes to working with the government. It seemed as if the upward trajectory I had taken in this endeavor was now slowly spiraling to the ground.

While Intrados was underway with my sister at the helm, I continued to teach at the university level and grew my own consulting and executive education business for Fortune 100 companies. I became sought after as an authority on future business trends, global economic assessment, and global corporate strategy and implementation. I found myself consulting with major corporations, governments, and government agencies, and regularly conducting executive programs for multinational corporations. Luckily, the breeze that my life had come to represent had drifted in an entirely new and unexpected direction.

While at George Washington University, I had been promoted to chair of the International Business Department, with the expectation that by increasing the standing of this department, it would in turn lead to the university increasing staff. George Washington was selected as one of the top five international business programs in the nation. Thus, I was stunned when I finally approached the school administration asking for more professors to carry the increasing workload of students enrolling and was told by the dean that they had no plans for doing so—partially because they never really expected me to stay indefinitely in the United States! “We thought you would be returning to Iran,” stated the dean.

Armed with the knowledge I had reached the limits of opportunity at GWU, I kept my ears open for other prospects in academia. One of my colleagues at the executive education program I taught at Penn State University approached me about a potential appointment to a soon-to-be-created chair in 1992.

I interviewed with Penn State benefactor William A. Schreyer, chairman emeritus of Merrill Lynch, along with Dean J. Hammond, and I accepted the newly endowed position as professor of Global Management, Policies, and Planning, with the understanding that I would additionally be the founding director of the new Center for Global Business Studies. Schreyer became my friend and mentor and later encouraged me to join the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the world’s preeminent foreign policy think tanks.

Moving from Washington, D.C., to State College, Pennsylvania, was another culture shock. Instead of being in a multiethnic city with world stature, I was now in the bucolic seat of college football mania, also fondly known as Happy Valley.

After a couple of years settling into the Penn State community, my twins, John Cyrus and Anna Shahrzad, were born. Having learned the lesson with our daughter Otessa, we decided to give them American first names and Persian middle names.

My consulting had me traveling globally, so regardless of where I was, I never stopped working. One of the opportunities my new position afforded me was to create my own board of directors for my center, and I chose a number of leaders from industry powerhouses whom I had worked with as a consultant. Eventually, I began to wonder when I would be asked to serve on any boards. While these Fortune 100 companies readily asked (and paid handsomely) for my insight and guidance, over the course of fifteen years I saw many board positions come and go with no offers proffered in my direction. I eventually figured out I would have to swallow my pride and actually ask to be considered. In 2006, I was granted a seat on the board of directors at Westfield Insurance Group. Headquartered in the Cleveland region, Westfield is an insurance and banking group of businesses. In addition to having a strong presence in Ohio, Westfield provides commercial and personal insurance in twenty-one states and surety services in thirty-one states. It has $3.7 billion in consolidated assets. Needless to say, I was honored to be selected to serve on the board.

The following year, the former vice president of Kodak North America and prior head of Kodak’s Healthcare Business Unit, Bob Hamilton, approached me to sit on the board of the newly formed Nason Medical Center, an innovative company that provides emergency and urgent care at one-sixth the cost of hospital emergency rooms. Nason is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, and it has served over five hundred thousand people in the region since the company started in 2005. The wait times at the emergency and urgent care centers are significantly shorter than the wait times at hospitals. As a board member, I helped to raise money for the firm as well as expand Nason from one facility to five.

Here I was, feeling as if I had finally been accepted into the bastion of white America. But now, looking back on all of my choices and the impetus upon which they were based, I cannot help but wonder if my story is unique.

Like many other immigrants before and after me, I had become aerodynamic, shaped by the stronger-than-normal forces I had encountered in my lifetime as an immigrant. I worked hard not to be knocked over by these forces, which often led to sacrifices. Having worked over seventy hours a week for most of my life, my family life was at times set aside. I relied on my wife, Lis, and my children to fend for themselves when I worked abroad for weeks and months at a time. Sometimes I wonder how it must feel to marry an immigrant like myself, and then I wonder how I was so lucky to find such a supportive wife. She has helped me withstand life’s storms and has kept me moving forward. She has tolerated moves from one place to another, from urban D.C. to bucolic State College to Tehran, Iran, and she has traveled all around the globe to grow our companies.

This is only one story of an immigrant. My success is built on hard work, a supportive family, and the American culture, which is based more on meritocracy and the tolerance of immigrants than on one’s heritage. But it would not have been possible without a number of mentors over the years—such as former Ursinus president Richter, who recommended I transfer to MIT; Professor Stobaugh of Harvard Business School, who always encouraged me; and William Schreyer, who not only supported me and my center at Penn State but also encouraged me to join CSIS.

4

What It Takes to Uproot Yourself

IMMIGRATION AS A FORCE OF CHANGE

A
s a nation of immigrants, the United States has wrestled with immigration since its founding. Who should be allowed to pass through the Golden Door? How many? The issue is always approached with an array of sentiments—from ambivalence to ignorance, xenophobia to embracement, nationalism to fear.

Yet no one can rightly deny that what helped make America strong economically, governmentally, politically, and militarily has been immigrants. They came and continue to come to this country with grand ambitions to succeed in an open and free society.

Our nation’s prosperity is built on the renegade, risk-taking, entrepreneurial concoction of truly American innovation and invention. Wave upon wave of immigrants bought into the American Dream that anything was possible in the United States, and anyone who put in the effort could succeed here. Immigrants, having taken the risk to come to the United States, are often entrepreneurial in nature. It is the entrepreneur who comes up with new ideas, takes risks, and tries new things. It is the entrepreneur who works long and hard, who finds the money for risky ventures, who breaks the rules, who is the pioneer and the inventor. Truly, entrepreneurs are the heroes of a growing economy.

However, “the continued failure to devise and implement a sound and sustainable immigration policy threatens to weaken America’s economy, to jeopardize its diplomacy, and to imperil its national security,” concludes a Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force cochaired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty.
¹

For most immigrants in the twenty-first century, coming to America is about the chance to start anew, to begin again, said author Joseph O’Neill, who is half Irish and half Turkish. He was raised in Holland, but he now lives in New York with his family. “One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity,” O’Neill said. “You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.”
²

Our immigrants are truly the Mothers of Invention. As Google vice president Omid Kordestani told the graduating class at San Jose University in 2007, “To keep an edge, I must think and act like an immigrant. There is a special optimism and drive that I benefited from and continue to rely on that I want all of you to find.
Immigrants are inherently dreamers and fighters
.”
³

Within today’s political and media discourse, immigration is generally framed as a social problem in need of solving. Newspaper headlines, editorials and blogs, as well as talk radio and television reveal a number of widely held negative perceptions about immigrants, including that they are reluctant to learn English, take jobs from native-born Americans, add to the crime problem, and contribute less to the tax revenue system than they use.

Yet a careful reading of the research debunks each of these myths. Additionally, while reviewing the research literature, I found that immigrants demonstrate a remarkable pattern of strengths. They have high levels of engagement in the labor market, and the children of immigrants go on to outperform their parents.

Children of immigrants learn from watching their parents work hard at making something of their lives in a country offering a chance to succeed. Many of them carry on to achieve great things. They do so in part to give something back to the country that allowed them and their parents the chance for a better life.